Narrative Initiative is a strategy hub. We collaborate with social movements to transform deeply held beliefs and values to make equity and justice the foundations of multiracial democracy.
Our Vision
Every region of the U.S. has a vibrant legacy of cross-racial movements for equity and justice. Every era has produced changemakers who have expanded democracy and civic participation. We celebrate the historic accomplishments of the movement to abolish slavery, the American Indian Movement, the feminist and LGBT movements, and immigrant justice movements. But we also recognize that the US has yet to become a truly just, fully multiracial democracy. History teaches us that people are the most important part of every movement and that social change moves in proportion to their narrative power.
The future of our country depends on millions of everyday narrators. Narrative reflects our people, our analysis, and our solutions, either supporting or weakening our ability to persuade more people to join us. Having more narrative power speeds up economic, cultural and political change.

We Believe
people have the right to create, shape, and change the narratives that affect their lives.

We Believe
everyone holds innate narrative power and that gathering and using that power is the work of organizing.

We Believe
narrative, combined with organizing, can shift political, cultural, and economic systems toward a truly just multiracial democracy and help our communities thrive.
How We Work
Culture, media, and movements make narrative. At Narrative Initiative, we partner with movements to build power. We choose projects that have the potential to move big ideas and connect communities in new, unexpected, and impactful ways.
Recruit great changemakers
Recruit great changemakers
Develop practitioner leadership
Develop practitioner leadership
Craft and support narrative interventions
Craft and support narrative interventions
You have to change yourself in order to change the world. We are responsible for the evolution of the human species. You begin with the protests, but you have to move on from there… just being angry does not constitute revolution.
Grace Lee Boggs, activist
Stories operate on the level at which individuals move, while narrative is the level at which societies move.
Jeff Chang, writer
Inside the word “emergency” is “emerge”; from an emergency new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.
Rebecca Solnit, writer
It is not the job of a good message to say what is popular. It is the job of a good message to make popular what we need said.
Anat Shenker-Osorio
Power you don’t use, you lose.
Daniel Hunter, activist and author